Related papers: Geometry in the twentieth century: A return to Euc…
So far, the most magnificent breakthrough in mathematics in the 21st century is the Geometrization Theorem, a bold conjecture by William Thurston (generalizing Poincar\'e's Conjecture) and proved by Grigory Perelman, based on the program…
This is the introduction I wrote for the multi-authored book "From Riemann to differential geometry and relativity", edited by L. Ji, A. Papadopoulos and S. Yamada (Berlin, Springer verlag, 2017). The book consists of twenty chapters,…
Mathematical objects are generally abstract and not very approachable. Illustrations and interactive visualizations help both students and professionals to comprehend mathematical material and to work with it. This approach lends itself…
Lecture given before the Royal Academy Vienna that summarizes the state of knowledge about the mathematics of the ancient Egyptians, up to 1884. Contains all relevant references to classical Greek texts, and the 'latest' archeology results.…
In this brief essay we succinctly comment on the historical origin of Hilbert geometry. In particular, we give a summary of the letter in which David Hilbert informs his friend and colleague Felix Klein about his discovery of this geometry.…
A focused modernization of Sophus Lie's brilliant writings about the foundations of geometry that every contemporary geometer should have at least once a look at. Translated, updated, commented.
The enduring legacy of Euclidean geometry underpins classical machine learning, which, for decades, has been primarily developed for data lying in Euclidean space. Yet, modern machine learning increasingly encounters richly structured data…
Spherical localisation is a technique whose history goes back to M.Gromov and V.Milman. It's counterpart, the Euclidean localisation is extensively studied and has been put to great use in various branches of mathematics. The purpose of…
This is an attempt to present axioms for Euclidean geometry, aiming at the following goals: to work with geometric notions (thus not merely identify points with pairs of numbers, giving a special status to a particular coordinate system);…
Throughout human history, people have used sight to learn about the world, but only in relatively recent times the science of light has been developed. Egyptians and Mesopotamians made the first known lenses out of quartz, giving birth to…
This is an introduction (in German) to projective geometry by the late Heinz Lueneburg. Projective spaces are treated as lattices with particular properties, and finite geometries receive special attention. The final chapters deal with…
This paper describes the evolution of aspects of differential and algebraic gometry from the mid 17th century till the end of the 18th century.
The emergence of the new, non-Euclidean geometry of Bolyai, Gauss, and Lobachevskii (BGL) and its impact on modern sciences is the subject of a series of biennial conferences. Below, I briefly review the history.
We review the memoir \emph{heorie der Parallellinien} by Johann Heinrich Lambert, written in 1766. Lambert, a victim of the prejudices of his time, conceived this memoir as an attempt to prove the so-called parallel postulate of Euclid's…
We present an overview of some significant results of Thurston and their impact on mathematics. The final version of this paper will appear as Chapter 1 of the book "In the tradition of Thurston: Geometry and topology", edited by K. Ohshika…
This paper constructs a Riemann surface associated to the icosahedron and discusses the geodesics associated to a flat metric on this surface. Because of the icosahedral symmetry, this is a distinguished special case of the example treated…
The early Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer published a book on geometry a few years before he died. This was intended to be a guide for young craftsmen and artists giving them both practical and mathematical tools for their trade. In the…
In this note, we discuss the role played by the techniques from the "foundations of geometry" and in particular by Desargues' Theorem in the work of Busemann. This note is part of a forthcoming edition of Busemann's collected papers.
In this paper, we propose that 'embodied mathematics' should be studied not only by reduction to the present individual bodily experience but in an historical context as well, as far as the origins of mathematics are concerned. Some early…
We give a brief survey of some of the geometry of mirror symmetry, written in 2004 for the "Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Physics". Probably a little bit out of date now in a few places, but hey.